


Hymn of Springtime

by thewhiskerydragon



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Forgiveness, Hades-centric, Love, Post-Canon, it's sadboi hours for hades, not much in the way of plot here folks!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 02:41:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20575100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewhiskerydragon/pseuds/thewhiskerydragon
Summary: There’s a crack in the wall of Hadestown, and it’s where the light gets in.Or: After Orpheus, Hades waits.





	Hymn of Springtime

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MaplePaizley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaplePaizley/gifts).

> Hadestown is one of those shows that's so perfect it almost feels like a sin to try touch it with fic.  
So, naturally, that's what I've decided to do here.

Persephone always likes to say that his office is more a mausoleum than anything resembling room—dark mahogany walls, floors polished to a dull petroleum gleam, humming neon lights that cast everything in a sickly pallid yellow. Hades himself personally thinks this is something of an overstatement. He is the god of the Dead, not of _ Death_, thank you very much, and let him strike whatever foolish soul dare challenge the difference into the Great Beyond. But he must allow her her complaints. Her unhappiness here is his own fault. Nothing grows underground where the sun won’t shine and the only warmth comes from the scorching heat of the foundry and the blazing lights of the power grid. What a difference it must make to a woman born under the stars with the dirt beneath her bare feet. He can’t make her happy here in Hadestown, not any more than he can make the sun shine or the grass grow. He’s been a fool not to realize that sooner.

Perhaps that’s why it hurts so much more to watch her go this time.

Perhaps that’s why, despite his every ounce of sense, he gives Orpheus and Eurydice a chance.

Persephone watches the two young lovers depart with heartbreak and disbelief in her eyes. A kindness she hadn’t expected from him. One he had neither expected from himself.

_ We’ll try again next fall_, he says, touching her hand. A promise and a wish for them both.

Her smile wrinkles the corners of her earth-brown eyes. _ Wait for me? _

_ I will_, he says.

_ How could I not? _ he thinks.

She kisses him goodbye, gathers up her things, and boards the train, but not before taking the flower Orpheus had sung into existence for them, its petals still red and fragrant, something beautiful and irrevocably delicate, and tucking it into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. Hades feels his mind reel as he watches the train leave, hears the shriek of the whistle sound somewhere in the distance.

When Orpheus turns, he feels something in him bend.

When Eurydice falls, he feels it break.

Hades sends his workers to collect her and bring her back to the factory floor. A deal is a deal. Against the back of his neck, he feels someone’s cold clever eyes watching and a cold sweep of wind. 

Without thought, his hand goes to the flower Persephone left for him. Such a delicate tremulous thing. A gift left behind by a poor young boy with everything to lose and everything lost.

Hades brings it back to his office and keeps it in a vase on his desk. He won’t dare touch it. One soul he’s already damned for eternity. Somehow, to mar this would only be a graver offense.

Solitude drags on as winter thaws and the world above blooms with spring. Orpheus and Eurydice haunt him. The memory of that long-forgotten song lingers in the dark corners of his office, between the dusty reams of paperwork and the idle ticks of the clock.

Time passes, and the wind begins to turn. Up there in the Great Above, wherever his wife is wandering now, the earth warms itself over. Hades hasn’t seen the summer in a thousand lifetimes. How much happier they had been then, back when the world was younger or only more foolish. Persephone had taken his hand and led him through her mother’s garden and pressed herself to him, and they had danced together to the song of their love and let the grass cushion their bare feet, and the trees had bent down around them to lay their fruit upon the ground.

How dearly and deeply he misses that happiness.

While his wife is gone, the minutes and seconds of everything feel longer—no shift in the wind, only dead soot-filled air and the factory whistle sounding out each shift.

Patiently, doggedly, mournfully, Hades waits.

Death and its creeping fingers do not.

After some time, the carnation begins to wilt, as all things do and must. Its petals grey and harden, the green of its stalk grows dry and brittle to touch. It curls over on itself, bent and mourning, not gone quite yet but so bitterly close.

Hades sees it and curses himself again. Flowers wither without the sun, rot and all apart without the warmth of the Up There. He should know that well enough by now.

And still the sight of it fills him with an ageless ancient sort of sorrow.

“Can’t put sunlight in a jar,” creeps in a cold clever voice from the door.

Hades looks up. There stand those three old women all dressed the same in scraps of grey and black, a triplet smile stretched across three wide mouths.

“Can’t take a fish out of water,” says the second.

“You thought you’d impress her?” says the third, laughter in her eyes.

Hades feels a rush of anger course through him. He stands suddenly from his desk, sending his chair shrieking back a good three feet or so, and slams his palms down hard enough to rattle the drawers.

The Fates don’t so much as flinch.

“Get out of my office!” he thunders.

The Fates laugh as they take their leave. Hades sends a gust of wind to slam the door shut behind them. It won’t keep them out forever. Nothing can or does. But he’ll throw himself to the deepest pits of Tartarus before he lets that silvery voice slither into his ear and twist itself around his mind again.

Hades falls back into his seat, and with it, into despair. Before him lies the dying remnants of whatever hope Orpheus had left. That song, sweet and haunting on his tongue, the scent of wild grass and wine, the warmth of those last summer days before the world turns over to fall. 

How little he can bear to lose that again.

Desperate, he unearths the carnation from its vase brings it to the edge of Hadestown. Dirty and dark, lit by sputtering electric lamps and the weak precious sunlight that shines through the crack in the brickwork he had let Persephone think he didn’t know about. Here, where the light is strongest, he gets down on his bended knee and lets the dirt sully the knees of his tailored trousers. With his bare trembling hands, he carves out a hole and places the flower in the earth, then pats it down, gives the roots a place to take hold.

But a flower still wilts in firm soil, even with the sun to warm it.

_ The song _ , he thinks. That song that brought it into existence, the song that poor young boy had brought back to him from the farthest reaches of his memory. He had known it once, a thousand lifetimes ago, treasured it then. He remembers the first time he and Persephone sang it, lying together in Demeter’s garden with the grass all lush around them, the taste of wine heavy in their mouths, their hands clasped together, singing that wordless melody that came to them without thought or reason, _ la la la la la la la_.

Hades closes his eyes and begins to sing it again.

On the third note, his voice cracks. Has it really been so long? Still, he presses on, the intervals and chords so achingly familiar he might just weep. The third, the fourth, the tonic. The earth seems to warm at his voice. The third, the fourth, the major lift. Hades feels the light of the great Up Above fall upon his face.

Feebly, the petals unfold upwards. Color blooms into them again, the red of Persephone’s wine, the red of cherries and sunset and love. Over the lump in his throat, he sings the green back into its stalk, the perfume back into its leaves.

Hades touches it gently and almost weeps. Then he stands without bothering to dust off his suit and returns to his office, but with a smile he’s unable to wipe from his face.

He’ll give that poor young boy a fighting chance again.

Smoke blackens the ceiling of Hadestown. The workers toil and slave away at their endless work. But in the distance, beyond the factories and mines and warehouses, brick by brick, piece by piece, the wall crumbles a little further.

Hades lets it.

Time passes. The wind begins to turn again. Mother Nature calls, as she always does. 

When Persephone descends again, with her suitcase full of sunflowers and her hair all perfumed with wild lavender, he’ll greet her at the train the way he did all those years ago as a young man in her mother’s garden and sweep her into his arms and beg her to take pity on his heart and forgive him for Orpheus, for Eurydice, for all the misery that’s passed between them.

Perhaps together they’ll plant a garden underground.

**Author's Note:**

> For my very dear friend.


End file.
